Sinn Fein: A Reactionary Party -A brief History (part 1)

                                                             Black and Tans in action

As every political party in the state and other interests is now looking to highjack the fast approaching centenary of the 1916 rising against British rule for their own gain, the clouds are so dense that it hard to see who or what party or interest holds the factual and moral legitimacy to the title of rightful heir apparent for the ascendancy for what happened in those weeks and its final aftermath. Though we are today in the sunlight of friendship with our nearest neighbours, and long may it last, we need to reflect on the darkness of our past to know and understand how that sun broke through and why it is still shining. 

For starters, it could not be because of the hierarchy of the Catholic church for they called for the legal murders of those Irishmen that fought in 1916, it could not be the other powers that still run the corrupt newspaper, The Irish Independent, for they too roared with high indignation that all the leaders must be executed quickly and without mercy. It was not even Sinn Fein for they had not led the rising or were heavily involved because they were not seen to be Independent minded enough, though they were pretty much blamed for everything wrong that has happened since by the media.

But it was what Sinn Fein did after the rising and the long term principles and goals that they held to, that has given them a constant and unshakeable momentum that continues to this day that put them before all the rest.

                                               Black and Tans on the hunt 

That is why the party deserves the recognition as the caretakers of Ireland’s fallen, who has sought to maintain so fervently the aims of what those men and women died for, even if they had disagreed with them. It is Sinn Fein that has wrote and still writes the eulogies for those people and those before them and the many that came after, and tried to ensure that their ultimate sacrifices would not be in vain as the Irish Republic became at last a reality. They were and are a reactionary force for the general good.

But the reality that it aspired for was up against a constant and slippery enemy, and it was not the time honoured one of England. It was the enemy within.

Sinn Fein was born from revolution and a party in the form of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) who had morphed into the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Sinn Fein sprang from the latter but also became their more moderate voice. The IRB back then was in full and violent outrage against the penal laws, and this was before the mother of all famines in 1847 had  murdered more Irishmen, women and children in their hundreds of thousands. The IRB was the reactionary force too in every sense of the word against mass murder. 

The other reality is that the great hunger was a famine in name only because Ireland brimmed with food for export controlled by the landed enemy that was England. It was the penal laws that kept the Irish in open prisons that led to the famine.  Edmund Burke described them best when he said: “ A machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, as well gutted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself, as ever preceded from the perverted ingenuity of man.” Hitler would have been proud.

                                              Black and Tans: One False Move

But like Hitler laws against the Jewish people, though they were criminally unjust and immoral in nature, they were legal. It was that legality that gave butchers, bullies and local interests their clubs to use in every vile manner against the Irish people. Its debasement was so intact within its enslavement that the native American Indians collected money to give relief for the Irish people; where Frederick Douglass, the African American abolitionist, was so moved in his visit to Ireland on the eve of the famine he said this: “ I gaze around in vain for one who will question my equal humanity, or offer me an insult.” For the first time he had seen, what he had thought until then was a privileged race, in worse chains and bondage than he or his people had ever been. It was the beginning of worse to come.

                                                             ____________

I will quietly and purposely digress for a moment. I live in a quiet and beautiful farming and fishing  village called Oughterard, nestled on the banks of the Corrib in Galway in the area that is Connemara. It was once a garrison village populated by the British armies, the RIC and the Black and Tans, which was yet another auxiliary and armed force that were hell bent on carnage and legal murder. Very near this village stands a wooden marker that tells of those that died of neglect and starvation from the workhouse that still stands there; their remains lie in the next field under the hooves and excrement of cattle.

                                             Black and Tans searching farmers

To travel out a little further from the town, you will see these people’s visible footprints in every valley, on every hill and across every mountain in Connemara. In the most inhospitable places that would challenge hardy mountain goats you will find those footsteps. The winds that chime through the clefts of rocks and through the valley’s of this place carry now their weary spirits as the melancholy rains still carry their tears. Their footprints are the long forgotten and grassed over potato drills that they were only allowed to farm to give life. When those potatoes became rife with blight, a death sentence was passed upon them. It would be a long time before the killing stopped.

As the 20th century was  just beyond it’s teenage years, a Back and Tan Officer in Galway named Lt. Col. Smyth gave this order to his men in June of 1920:

“Should the order (“Hands up”) not be immediately obeyed, shoot and shoot with effect. If the persons approaching (a patrol) carry their hands in their pockets, or in any suspicious-looking, shoot them down. You may mistakes occasionally and innocent persons may be shot, but that cannot be helped, and you are bound to get the right parties sometime. The more you shoot, the better I will like you, and I assure you no policeman will get into trouble for shooting any man.” 

It was Sinn Fein who set out to alter that point of view Lt. Col. Smyth, the British Government and an unwilling Irish elite. It is still an ongoing process for the Irish elite in a world that has changed utterly as they seek to paint Sinn Fein as pariahs rather than the principled party it is today, set against the corruption of Fianna Fail and the ineptness of Fine gael that is propped up by Labour in its usual compliant and pliable mode......... 

Barry Clifford

To be continued……..